Gentoo linux på Zepto znote 4200

Wireless driver

Assuming the kernel has support for wireless networking it is pretty easy to install the driver for the Intel 2200BG wireless card.
First we need to enable the wireless card using the software switch. This can be accomplished by using the acerhk package. To install acerhk do the following:

emerge -av acerhk

When finished you need to modprobe the acerhk module, do the following as root:

modprobe acerhk usedritek=1 autowlan=1 force_series=290

Now you can enable the card by doing:

echo 1 > /proc/driver/acerhk/wirelessled

I have my laptop configured so that it will do this automatically at boot. If you want to enable the wireless card at boot, do the following as root:

Now that the wireless card is enabled, we need to install the driver itself. To do that, do the following as root:

emerge -av ieee80211 ipw2200

The emerge of ieee80211 might fail complaining about the existence of ieee80211 in the kernel. That is because recent kernels (>=2.6.13) ships with some sort of support for ieee80211 that conflicts with the ieee80211 package. To resolve this issue, do the following as root:

rm /usr/src/linux/include/net/ieee80211.h

and then try to emerge ieee80211 ipw2200 again.
When the emerge of ipw2200 has finished, you can load the driver by doing the following as root:

modprobe ipw2200

After the module has been loaded it should have provided an eth* interface representing the wireless card.

If you want to load the module at boot, you can do it by adding ipw2200 to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6:

echo ipw2200 >> /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6

Important: You need to re-emerge acerhk ieee80211 ipw2200 every time you install a new kernel.

You also need wireless-tools so that you can associate your card with an access point. To install wireless-tools, do the following as root:

emerge -av wireless-tools

This will provide the applications iwconfig and iwlist that can associate and search for wireless networks.

Hotkeys

The two hotkeys by the power button are recognized as soon as you insert the acerhk module. They need to be configured before use, however. In X-Windows, this can be achieved by creating an appropriate Xmodmap file. Xmodmap is a neat little program that can assign new meanings to keycodes, in essence emulating any keyboard layout you wish. If you want a file custom fitted for the ZNote 4200, you can download one here. To use it, run the command

xmodmap Xmodmap

After you have done this, you should be able to use the keys as normals keys. For instance, you can bind them to global shortcuts in KDE or GNOME, which is what I did.

Volume Up/Down

The key combos Fn+Up and Fn+Down are used to turn the volume up and down, respectively. In order for these buttons to have any effect, they have to be bound to an action. In KDE this is very easy to do, using the KHotKeys program. All you need to do is download this file, and open the KDE Control Center, choosee „Regional & Accessibility“, and „KHotKeys“. Then choose „General Settings“ and „Import new Actions“, select the freshly downloaded file and you're done. These actions catch Fn+Up and Fn+Down and run „aumix“ with parameters for turning the volume up and down. Thus, it requires „aumix“ (naturally), but you're likely to have it, as it's a standard mixer program. At the moment, there's no visual feedback for these actions, but they still do work. (If not, let me know)